Interlude: Bugs

ON WITH THE SHOW!

The World Later Called Shadow by Inferior Beings: Before

It began with the fire.

There had been things before that, of course, endless things, and all the same. They were the only sentient minds in the universe, and the world – this world, here – was the universe. They were the people, superior to animals, pure and clever.

In their raw forms, they looked like dark clouds or like smoke. If anyone with a mind to reason and comprehend had ever gotten close enough to look, then they might have noticed that the people were more like swarms. But that hypothetical rival would have had to survive the doing of it, and there had never been any other creature with the wits to do so. The people were sure that there was not anything else like them on this world, and the sky was a fixed and airless ceiling past which they could not go, and if they could not, then nothing could, because they were the pinnacle of evolution.

They had ascended from swarms of thousands of tiny insects, many acting as one. Over time, each member, each drone, had shrunk and become cells of a whole that thought deep and complex thoughts as an individual, a self. The components of their bodies had become so small they no longer resembled living creatures to the naked eye, but rather seemed only fragments when many such clumped together. They stopped thinking when they broke apart, but when they reformed and reached the critical mass necessary for conscious thought they were born anew, over and over again. They traded encoded memories as easily as they traded pieces of themselves.

It was their world, and they were legion. When they needed to hunt, or merely to play in different ways, they could take hosts for themselves. They favored the use of the animals with claws, which were unthinking but efficient, and useful to dwell within. The swarms coexisted with the beasts, which carried out such biological functions as synthesizing the rarer chemicals they needed from the parts of the world both animal and riding swarm consumed. The beasts were the most convenient hosts because of their size and their position at the almost top of the food chain. But their brains were stupid and stunted and easily controllable when the swarms infested them at will and abandoned them when the animals ceased to be useful.

The swarms were intelligent, sentient, creative, and not, in their own minds, cruel. The complexity of their movements and the interactions of their components transmitted information to the whole and to others like them. They thought. They thought I, and they thought we. They spoke to each other and they lived. They were kings of the universe, as far as they understood a concept that they had never had to defend.

And when they needed to ride the winds and move freely then they could do that too.

And then there had been the fire.

Two of them had gone to see what it was, naked and shapeless in the night, because there had been no lightning strike, no storm, although there was a new scent on the air and when it had blown in a wind that one of them could taste then it had tasted it and wondered. It tasted of somewhere else. Of something else than the endless turn of the world that they ruled.

By the little fire – no lightning had started that – there was a new animal that walked on two legs like the hunter beasts, but was so much smaller and lighter.

They tried out the shape for themselves, to see what it felt like.

There was a noise, once, twice, and again, and the new animal fled. Its movements interested the swarms, but not as much as the thing that ripped through one of them.

The loss of individual components, the small cells, was nothing to the swarm that had been hit, especially not compared to the taste of the thing.

It was metal, a small pellet and not ripped-from-the-ground and impure-tasting raw: refined and forged and shaped in a way entirely new.

Metal was a treasure, on this world, and this creature had so much that it could throw it away. The shadows followed the machine – more metal, and lightning-tasting energy in it! – across their territory, riding the winds in pursuit and letting it lead them to another one. While the new animals remained on their world, the swarms watched from the shadows they resembled as new worlds and new ideas opened up to them.

Then the creatures left, up into the sky and gone.

So there were animals in the sky. Perhaps the people should have gone along with them, to find out what the sky was like and how best they could use it. But they thought of this only afterwards, and there were no more sky animals for some time.

Then others had come, and observation gave the swarms even more ideas to consider. The animals were not all that different from the hunting beasts, but the differences! The strangers had metal worked in such intricacy that they could use it to fly up and down to the stars! Their delicate paws and clever fingers changed the world around them. They spoke to each other in complex patterns of sound and movement rather than chemical transmission and reception of scent and reflection and the transmission of interchangeable swarm members. They traveled in groups. They could do things that the swarms had never seen, but evoked emotions in the observers that…

The swarms had been the dominant form of life on the world for as long as they could remember, for as long as it had mattered. The swarms had never before felt jealous.

They reluctantly had to admit, amongst themselves, that the strangers were not only intelligent but that the invaders had the edge on them.

Clearly this was intolerable, incorrect, and must be remedied in some thorough and unconditional manner. The swarms were the kings of the world, and everything in the world belonged to them.

But the invaders tasted enough like the beasts that what worked when they wanted to ride the latter might work on the former…

The first time the invaded invader died. The second time it rejected the swarm, and later died, screaming and alone and reeking of fear and panic. The third time, when the swarm fell onto and into it while it slept, the invader became so sick that the swarm left before it could be harmed as a consequence of the creature's physical distress. But the pioneering swarms learned a little more every time.

The fourth time the merging worked well enough, for now. They would get better, with practice. There were enough of them all across the world that they could have taken every one of the invaders and many, many more, but for the moment they explored only. And the swarms began to learn just what these – people, how did they dare to think that they were people? – were. They began to learn what the invaders from the sky, who challenged the rule of the people over the world, could do. And, even better, they began to find out just what the swarms of Shadow, they call it Shadow, they call us shadows and they think us only dreams and nightmares could do with them.

The skies, full of others, had opened up and brought the universe outside of the world in. Some of it tasted…interesting, and some of it could be used. With thought. With care. With time.

Exactly what they wanted was simple. They were the rulers of the world, and clearly the rest of the universe was part of the world. They would own it and consume it and shape it too, now that they knew there were things of interest to them out there, and now that they could use the invaders to carry them up to the stars. Anything else, any other outcome, was impossible and unnatural. Anything else would go against millennia of rule.

Exactly how they were going to restore the balance was likely to be less simple. But they were clever. They would find a way.


to be continued

Author's Note: Regular chapters will resume shortly.